The life of Richard Aaron…
August 28, 2008, 1:18 pm PTI have returned from the beautiful but scarred land of southern California to a grand total of 293 emails in my inbox. To add additional complication, a member of our family, Fat-Lu the Himalayan cat, had to be put down while we were away. So the women in the house are beside themselves. I was home for one day and managed to get through the first 100 emails before I had to fly off to a complex and nasty negotiation in Vancouver (I’ve got to tell you, lawyers are terrible people). I arrived back home last night to try to console the still-grieving household. I made the catastrophic error of saying, only once, with a genuine but foolish attempt at kindness, that there would be economic benefits to not having to feed the cat anymore. After braving the firing squad brought on by THAT comment, I retreated to my office for the rest of the night.
By 11 PM everything had quieted down, so I pulled out the sequel, “Counterplay,” and began trying to figure out how to get Richard out of a massive underground fortress in central Iran; I finally threw in the towel at 1 AM. Six in the morning hit like a hammer. My usual practice is to jump out of bed and into the shower so fast that I don’t really wake up, and certainly do not have the opportunity to consider how insane my life has become. My body seems to have remembered this practice even through my holiday. This morning I stumbled into the office to find 50 new emails, none of which are spam, since my spam blocker is revved up as high as it can go.
The problem now is that somewhere in this Grecian chorus of emails is an email from my editor, telling me where my advance copies of Gauntlet are. I can’t find the email. It is definitely possible that the spam blocker thinks that by editor sends only spam. I don’t know how these things work. To add to the seduction, she has now sent me photographs of a small pile of books… the Gauntlet ARCs, boxed up and ready to go. But I can’t touch them. I don’t even know when I’ll receive my copies. All I really want is to give Turbee his copy. Maybe that and better drugs. Maybe I should corner some of those drugs for myself…